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TS7650G ProtecTIER Deduplication virtual tape gateway

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Continuing this week's theme about the products that were part of last week's IBM Information Infrastructurelaunch, I will cover today the IBM System Storage TS7650G ProtecTIER deduplication gateway.

Before acquisition, Diligent offered only software. The task of putting this software on an appropriate x86 server with sufficientmemory and processor capability was left as an exercise for the storage admin. With the TS7650G, IBM installs theProtectTIER software on the fastest servers in the industry, the IBM System x3850 M2 and x3950 M2. This eliminateshaving the storage admins pretend that they have hardware engineering degrees.

Before acquisition, the software worked only on a single system. IBM was able to offer multiple configurations of the TS7650G, including a single-controller model as well as a clustered dual-controller model. The clustered dual-controller model can ingest data at an impressive 900 MB/sec, which is up to nine times faster than some of thecompetitive deduplication offerings.

Before acquisition, ProtecTIER emulated DLT tape technology. This limited its viability, as the market sharefor DLT has dropped dramatically, and continues to dwindle. Most of the major backup software support DLT as anoption, but going forward this may not be true much longer for new tape applications.IBM was able to extend support by adding LTO emulation on theTS7650G gateway, future-proofing this into the 21st Century.

At last week's launch, covering so many products with so few slides, this announcement was shrunken down to a single line "Store 25 TB of backups onto 1 TB of disk, in 8 hours" and perhaps a few people missed that this wasactually covering two key features.

With deduplication, the TS7650G might get up to 25 times reduction on disk. If you back up a 1 TB data basethat changes only slightly from one day to the next, once a day for 25 days, it might only take 1 TB, or so, of disk tohold all the unique versions, as most of the blocks would be identical, rather than 25 TB on traditional disk or tapestorage systems. The TS7650G can manage up to 1 PB of disk,which could represent in theory up to 25 PB of backup data.

With an ingest rate of 900 MB/sec, the TS7650G could ingest 25 TB of backups during a typical 8 hour backup window.

The 25 TB of the first may not necessarily be the 25 TB of the second, but the wording was convenient for marketingpurposes, and a comma was used to ensure no misunderstandings.Of course, depending on the type of application, the frequency of daily change, and the backup software employed, your mileage may vary.